Rock Island Shawl

 

As promised, a post about my latest shawl, Rock Island from Jared Flood, aka Brooklyn Tweed. I spotted this new pattern a couple of weeks ago, and when the lovely Fiona at Grace and Jacob in York gave me a skein of her hand-dyed new alpaca/silk/cashmere 800m laceweight to play with, it seemed like the perfect time to start.

The shawl’s an interesting construction, you start with the edging -

which is an eight row repeat, between 12 and 16 stitches wide, and is repeated 71 times. Which did get a little tedious (all that turning!) but I got there in the end. It was about 2.3m long when I’d done. There’s lace on every row, so it does require some concentration, and I’d highly recommend colour-coding the chart, as k2togs and ssks are different on each side, which confused my little brain.

There’s a yarn-over/k2tog combination at the beginning of every other row, making a nice line of loops down one side -

which you use to pick up stitches for the body of the shawl. At this point I got completely into the knitting and didn’t take any photos until it was nearly done, but basically you do ten rows or so of garter stitch, then 24 rows of lace (again on both sides, but pretty simple, just a two row repeat really), then the rest of the shawl is garter stitch, with the rows getting shorter by four stitches every right side row (just like a normal top down shawl but in reverse).

This is about two thirds of the way through the last garter stitch section.

It’s one of those lace patterns that looks like nothing on earth before it’s blocked, but afterwards it’s beautiful.

This gives an idea of the size of it – the boards are 24” square, and it goes right to the corners. I threaded wires along the top edge, then through the line of yarn over holes to stretch the main section to size, then carefully threaded more wires through the points – this was a bit tricky, as it’s not immediately obvious where they are, but I managed it in the end. Having the other set of wires in definitely helped.

The garter stitch section did go a bit funky in places, with some stitches seeming to disappear, but I think that was down to knitting fine yarn on big (4.5mm) needles. I like the effect it gives though, so all good.

And it’s huge! It was 21” x 46” before blocking, afterwards it’s 31” x 64”, quite a difference…

I love the lightness of the lace pattern now it’s blocked.

And decreasing up the centre means you don’t get that obvious line that you get when increasing with yarn overs either side of a central stitch.

I used about 60g of yarn, so about 480m, which is about 70m less than the recommended amount. I went up a needle size to compensate for me being a tight knitter, and my shawl is more or less the same size as the pattern says, so it seems like it might be over-estimated. The yarn was lovely to work with, and has blocked beautifully – it’s as light as air, and very soft.

It was a reasonably straight-forward knit, but the lace does require concentration – it’s definitely not an in-front-of-the-television knit for those parts, but I did manage to listen to audiobooks whilst knitting it (Ngaio Marsh’s Overture to Death, and Agatha Christie’s Mystery on the Blue Train).